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Daphne Merkin
The Importance of Being Hannah Arendt
Daphne Merkin on a brilliant new film presenting Hannah Arendt in the midst of the Eichmann trial and the 'banality of evil.' I have...

Bridget Jones Is Back
After more than a decade, the woman who put the chick in lit is ready to give her millions of fans exactly what they want: an update on...


No Success Like Failure
From the wreckage of his life, Richard Yates salvaged a few good books Posthumous literary reputations are tricky affairs, as is the...


The Lady Vanquished
Jean Rhys articulated the plight of the abandoned woman Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck...


The Upside of Anger
Claire Messud’s novel of a stalled woman artist From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a...


Behind the Green Baize Door
Two books explore England’s master-servant divide SERVANTS: A DOWNSTAIRS HISTORY OF BRITAIN FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO MODERN TIMES...


A Novel of the 'Post-Wounded Woman'
This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed,...


So We Read On and Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers and Swells
Did the Jazz Age ever exist — apart from being a cultural construct, that is, a coinage credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one that he...


The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Lévy
THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM By Bernard-Henri Lévy Translated by Steven B. Kennedy 240 pp. Random House. $28. What is one to make of...


Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison
The idea that great psychic suffering is conducive to art—that mental illness and creativity are somehow intertwined—is a longstanding...


Nothing Natural by Jenny Diski
IN THE ANNALS OF EROTIC LITERATURE, a subject that consistently draws women writers of a certain ilk—smart, literate, and tough-minded—is...


Book Review: Lights On, Rats Out by Cree LeFavour
Memoir writers, not unlike Blanche DuBois, depend upon the kindness of strangers. Although such writers are often saddled with...


Philip Roth's Best Book
The death of Philip Roth this week led to near instantaneous debate about which of his books was his best. There was the transgressive...

Book Review: See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore
Collections of essays and reviews are the neglected stepchildren of book publishing, generally undertaken to please or placate an author...


Book Review: Motherhood by Sheila Heti
A provocative work probes the new norms of femininity. We live in fast and loose times, when everything from the relevance of gender to...


Rejecting the Link Between Creativity and Alcoholism
By all rights, Leslie Jamison’s new memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath shouldn’t work. For one thing, it rehashes a...


Kurt Eichenwald’s Memoir: A Mind Unraveled
A trauma is a trauma is a trauma. Or is it? Over the past decade, the words “trauma” and “traumatic” have been used so profligately and...


The Journey of Diana Trilling
There are people who, for whatever reason—some combination of personality and fate—never seem to catch a break, no matter what their...


A Famous Misanthrope Shows his Heartwarming Side
“IT WAS HIS QUOTABILITY,” observed the critic Clive James, “that gave Larkin the biggest cultural impact on the British reading public...

Dream Girl
Much as we might rag on it, the awful truth must be looked at head-on: Reality TV, that fiction of verisimilitude, is, even for people...


Writings & Reviews
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